An inspection of a semiconductor wafer is taken as an example of substrate for a description below. A semiconductor device is manufactured by repeating a process of transferring a pattern formed on a photo-mask to a semiconductor wafer by lithography processing and etching processing. Quality of lithography processing, etching processing and other processing and an occurrence of foreign matter in a manufacturing process of semiconductor devices have a great influence on fabrication yields of semiconductor devices. Therefore, various devices for inspecting patterns on semiconductor wafers in the manufacturing process are used to detect an occurrence of abnormal conditions or defects in the manufacturing process at an early stage or in advance.
As methods for inspecting defects present in patterns on a semiconductor wafer, a defect inspection device that irradiates a semiconductor wafer with light and compares circuit patterns of the same type of a plurality of LSIs using optical images, and a defect inspection device that irradiates a semiconductor wafer with a charged particle beam such as an electron beam and detects generated secondary electrons or reflected electrons to convert a signal thereof to images before detecting defects, have been put in practical use.
Known is a charged particle beam apparatus for defect inspection employing a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), which improves throughput thereof by adopting a stage tracking system that makes a charged particle beam scan while a target to be inspected being continuously moved (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 05-258703). However, the movement direction of the stage and the scanning direction are predetermined and the degree of freedom when an image is acquired is low and therefore, there remain problems of both action to be taken when distortion of an image occurs and difficulty in improving throughput.